On the political front, this is the best thing to come along since the election (I get the daily newsletter and you should, too). But kudos also to the New York Times and the Washington Post for some seriously excellent investigative journalism in recent weeks.

Trump’s attacks on the media are nothing new. They’ve been employed by dictators throughout history, and they are chilling. One of the most important essays I’ve read in a great long while explains.

On an entirely different note, I’ve learned how to print my own postage stamps, courtesy of La Poste! This may herald a new era of actual snail mail. Or it may not. Also on the list: how to print them so they are STRAIGHT.

Had a wonderful, carb-overflowing lunch yesterday at a favorite place, the Auberge du Dully. For mysterious reasons, I seem to be very well known to the staff there . . . .

Addressing the women’s division of the United Jewish Appeal just after the Second World War, in 1946, Eleanor Roosevelt said, “We let our consciences realize too late the need of standing up against something that we knew was wrong. We have therefore had to avenge it–but we did nothing to prevent it. I hope that in the future, we . . . remember that there can be no compromise . . . with the things we know are wrong.”

This marvelous (I reckon at The New Yorker, that’s ‘marvellous’) passage is from Mary Norris’s Between You & Me:

“Ed Stringham, the head of the collating department [you’ll have to read the book to find out what that is], had been at The New Yorker for decades and had grown a hump on his back in the service of the magazine. He came into the office most days at about 3 p.m. He had an ambitious reading agenda, which he charted in a series of black-and-white composition books. He supplemented his reading with the art and the music of whatever culture he was into at the time. He had started with Greece, moved on to Rome, and approached every country in Europe methodically: France, Germany, Spain, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Faeroe Islands. He became especially involved in the literature of countries behind the Iron Curtain: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania.”

For the umpteenth time, I now resolve to be more methodical in my reading!

Or close enough! Have just arrived New Zealand to spend a few days with friends. They are going to show me a new part of the world. Cannot wait to see if the water does indeed go down the drain the other way 😉

The flights to get here were oh so long, but I managed to watch the entire second season of Broadchurch–that took up the entire flight from Newark to San Francisco–and to finish The Folded Clock (2 stars, at most), and to get about halfway through Dispatches from Pluto–highly recommended so far. The author moved from New York to Holmes County, Mississippi, my Dad’s birthplace. As Faulkner said, “To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.”